Thursday, April 23, 2015

As part of its mandate of
"openness", the Harper government established an "open data
portal" website at data.gc.ca. According to a March
31, 2015 speech by John Carmichael, Conservative MP for Don Valley
West in Ontario, in 2012 - 2013, the Harper government provided Canadians with
nearly six million pages of government information, more than ever before.
In addition, Mr.Carmichael states that the federal government has posted
three million pages of archived government records online.

Let's see just how open one part of the Harper government was during 2014. Since Tony Clement, President of the
Treasury Board, was responsible for unveiling Canada's Open Government Action
Plan in April 2012, I will focus on the data for completed
Access to Information requests for the Treasury Board of Canada. Monthly data for completed Access to
Information Act (ATIA) requests can be found on the Treasury Board of Canada
website for each month since July 2010. For the purposes of this posting,
I am looking at the complete dataset for the period from January 1, 2014 to
December 31, 2014.

The government has four main classifications for
assessing an ATIA as being complete:

1.) Nothing disclosed
(exemption)

2.) Partial disclosure

3.) Full disclosure

4.) No records exist

The "nothing
disclosed" because of an exemption is an interesting classification.
Under this exemption, there are two types; class-based and harm-based.
Under class-based exemptions, it is presupposed that the information is
inherently sensitive and that injury or prejudice will occur if the information
is released. This includes information that contains personal information
(i.e. our income tax information) and information that could result in the release
of trade secrets and confidential financial, commercial technical or scientific
information of third parties because such information does not actually belong
to a third non-government party. Under the harm-based exemptions, if
the head of the government institution deems that there will be some harm,
injury or prejudice either to the government or a third party resulting from
the release of the data, the data is subject to an exemption. This leaves the
playing field wide open since a Minister can easily determine that the release
of the data will result in harm to the Harper government. If you are
interested, here is a link to the Department of Justice
webpage on the structure of the ATIA exemptions scheme.

Now, let's look at the
ATIA request completions by category for the Treasury Board for all of 2014 as shown on this bar graph:

In total, there were 212
completed ATIA requests in 2014 and just over half were disclosed in part along
with one-quarter being disclosed completely.

Here is a pie chart
showing the distribution of ATIA requests by level of completion:

As I noted above, you'll
note that 51.9 percent of all completed ATIA requests in 2014 fell into the
"disclosed in part" category and that only 24.5 percent fell into the
"all disclosed" category. The "disclosed in part"
category means that taxpayers have absolutely no idea whether the government
has disclosed 1 percent of the information or 99 percent of the information.
That is far from what any logical person would think of as "open
government".

Let's look at a partial
list of the requests that were "disclosed in part" and the number of
pages of data released:

2.) list of briefing
notes and Question Period notes for the month of December 2013 - 2 pages

3.) a copy of all
documents showing the USB keys purchased by the Treasury Deparment for each
year from 2005 to 2013 - 36 pages

4.) all documents
including but not limited to, memos, emails, and reports concerning Senate
pensions between September 1, 2013 and November 14, 2013 - 169 pages

And, here's the most
ironic of the bunch:

5.) All summary budgetary
information on the cost of implementing the Open Government initiative,
including IT costs, administrative costs, travel, etcetera, since the start of
the initiative - 470 pages

While the Harper
government loves to tout the federal government's new culture of openness
through the Open
Government website, in fact, as we can see from the data in this
posting, obfuscation is still the order of the day and it is quite clear that
government openness is in the eye of the beholder.

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About Me

I have been an avid follower of the world's political and economic scene since the great gold rush of 1979 - 1980 when it seemed that the world's economic system was on the verge of collapse. I am most concerned about the mounting level of government debt and the lack of political will to solve the problem. Actions need to be taken sooner rather than later when demographic issues will make solutions far more difficult. As a geoscientist, I am also concerned about the world's energy future; as we reach peak cheap oil, we need to find viable long-term solutions to what will ultimately become a supply-demand imbalance.